On Wednesday the Thomas Massie-authored articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth were voted down via a procedural vote by the GOP. I didn’t expect the Trump toadies who infest the GOP to start the impeachment process, especially after Trump’s post about how great Hegseth was, but Mike Johnson and Massie had a plan:
Tom Massie filed some articles of impeachment. He chose when to file them, and chose to file them to overlap with Veterans Day, which Pete Hegseth exploited in fighting back and which also meant at least one person, Nancy Pelosi, had a pre-scheduled Veterans Day event on the other side of the country.
Mike Johnson, who remains Speaker until January, was obligated to call a vote within two business days. Over the course of yesterday, there were signs (notably, Don Bacon’s flip-flopping comments about whether he’d support impeachment or not) that the GOP developed a strategy on it.
Sometime in the afternoon, Mike Johnson set the vote for 5:30, which happened to be right in the middle of a publicly scheduled event a number of the Dems were going to be at and (I believe) after Nancy Pelosi had already left for that publicly scheduled event at which she would be honored.
Online Dems were furious at the Dems who didn’t make the last minute vote and ignored the facts:
The vote was a bit curious in that the numbers rose together, such that Republicans always had about ten more votes in favor of tabling impeachment than Democrats — perhaps a sign that some people were waiting to vote until their vote was needed.
In the end, the vote was gaveled at 6:02 when some number of people returning to the Hill from the prescheduled event had not yet returned. That is how Mike Johnson runs his House: by keeping votes open until he has the votes he wants. It’s what you get to do when you are Speaker.
Marcy goes into the details of the ensuing votes and ends up here:
What that shows is even if the six people who wanted to vote for impeachment had gotten back (which would have resulted in 210 votes), the GOP still had plenty of people available to make sure impeachment was tabled. If all six had made it back, Johnson would have just kept the vote open long enough to defeat the vote. Even if Nancy Pelosi had canceled her event at the last minute, the GOP still would have had a three vote margin. Even if Haley Stevens had pretended she was still a Democrat, the GOP still would have had a two vote margin. (One of the other Dems missing, Luis Correa, is having surgery today.)
What all that tells you is, one, Trump’s people pulled out the stops to make sure impeachment failed.
It also failed because it was never a serious impeachment effort—per Massie himself who said he thinks impeachment will only be messier if the matter waits until Democrats are in control of Congress in January.
He added: “I’m being polite here. What is an impeachment? An impeachment is just firing someone, really. You don’t go to prison, you don’t go to jail, you don’t pay a fine. When the Democrats get in charge, they are going to be very vicious.”
And:
“Will it work? I hope for his sake it does work, because the Democrats are going to bring people in here who have served under him and with him, give them protection,” Massie told reporters Monday afternoon, adding that he predicted there would be a “robust trial over in the Senate.”
None of this was a serious attempt to hold Hegseth accountable. Any trial before the Senate changes hands will be a farce and even if Hegseth had been pressured to step down, it’d allow that same GOP-led Senate to approve his replacement. But the press these days wants clicks over thoughts, so here we are.
I agree with this:
Oh and how did Hegseth repay his Republican colleagues who went to such great lengths to protect him? With this shameful behavior:
wow — CNN broadcast footage of an Arlington guard yelling at a group with Pete Hegseth to "MAINTAIN SILENCE … PAY RESPECT!" after someone in his entourage started laughing at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
I’ll leave you with this:
The historian in me is at pains to remember that when the Republicans impeached President Clinton, the House voted for the articles of impeachment in December 1998 during a lame duck session. The trial in the Senate wasn’t held until January 1999 when a new Congress had been sworn in. If that had happened to Hegseth (and it still might), you can bet the Republicans would squawk to high heaven about how unfair it was to poor Pete, and the political media would gleefully back their bad faith complaint.
back then the galleries were open to the public without any fanfare so my friends and I got in line the day of the impeachment vote. we ended up sitting in the press section and because they were taking the vote everyone had to stay put until the votes were over. a very lucky series of events!